I was really obsessed with age. I kept saying it was a record about trying to age gracefully.

You can think of a number of bands where the first record is by far their biggest record. And that must be hard for people to recapture. Hard for people to live with.

You can either go to the gym because you want to lose weight, or you can go to the gym because you like how it makes you feel when you're running.

It's good to have some kind of California in there. It's almost always appropriate. It's appropriate on a sunny day or late at night. If you grew up on the Grateful Dead, which I certainly did, you listened to 10 million bootlegs. But you realize that American Beauty has some really tight, well-arranged songs that aren't meandering.

In the end, when you're writing a really good song, it strikes the right tone.

I graduated high school in 1989, and there was no alternative rock radio, and there wasn't really good college radio you could get on a car stereo. Once you get a car at that age, you're spending all the time you can away from home, sometimes just driving around aimlessly. Listening, or not even listening, but subconsciously soaking up this classic rock barrage.

I think when you are doing a song you're trying to give people enough details that they connect.